Toxic jewelry may be in your home right now

Sarah Schmidt, Canwest News Service07.08.2010

An assortment of children's jewelry recently recalled for high amounts of lead. Wearing a necklace or bracelet with lead is not a health hazard, but sucking on it or swallowing a piece, even with low levels of lead, can wreak havoc on a young brain and cause permanent brain damage with long-term exposure.

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So far this year, 20 different children's jewelry items have been recalled in Canada for being packed with lead, nowhere near the maximum allowable limit of 0.06 per cent. Each sailed through the Canadian border and slipped through the quality-control systems put in place by various companies in the supply chain, resulting in tens of thousands of toxic pieces ending up in Canadian homes. In a three-part series, Canwest News Service reporter Sarah Schmidt looks into the potentially life-threatening issue that begins in a Chinese factory with a melange of melted down car batteries or electronic waste and ends with a Canadian girl sporting a toxic jewel.

MONTREAL - The flagship store for the Canadian retail chain Garage is in the heart of Montreal's shopping district, a destination for fashionable tween and teen girls and a world away from the southern Chinese town of Shenzhen, where a batch of Garage jewelry was made last year.

The girls here appear carefree as they browse the summer collection and accessories. At checkout, they can pick up a treat at the candy counter before stepping out onto St. Catherine Street, the city's airy main drag for the fashion conscious and mainstream trendies.

On the other side of the globe is Shenzhen, a boomtown adjacent to Hong Kong. There, labour is cheap and abundant and there is no end of small, medium and large size factories, cloistered away in industrial parks. Cut off from public view by electronic fences and protected by guards, tens of thousands of workers brought in from China's poorest provinces make everything from iPhones to computers to T-shirts to children's jewelry.

As an added incentive, this city on the Pearl River close to where it flows into the South China Sea has a vibrant port where goods can be moved quickly from factory floor to markets around the world - factories that are unencumbered by meaningful regulations governing the content of their products.

These two worlds collided in the spring when Garage recalled more than 4,000 bracelets manufactured in a Shenzhen factory by Betawin Enterprises Inc., made exclusively for Garage stores across Canada.

Wearing a necklace or bracelet with lead is not a health hazard, but sucking on it or swallowing a piece, even with low levels of lead, can wreak havoc with a young brain and cause permanent brain damage with long-term exposure. It can also kill.

In 2006, a four-year old boy from Minnesota died after swallowing a heart-shaped bracelet pendant, given away by Reebok with a pair of running shoes. Tests showed the piece was 99 per cent lead.

That's why Maya Lukovic is so upset about the Garage jewelry packed with lead. Her daughter Niki, 11, shops there and has some Garage pieces in her collection. Niki's young cousin, four-year old Nikola, also lives with them, and loves to play with the jewelry.

“He's constantly in my daughter's room and walking out with jewelry. Sometimes I'd find jewelry in his mouth, especially when it's colourful jewelry. He knows not to eat it, but he'll suck on it,” says Lukovic of Toronto.

In Canada, the legal limit for lead content in jewelry designed for or marketed to children under 15 years is 0.06 per cent - a strict limit put in place five years ago so overseas manufacturers would stop using toxic raw materials to make happy-face pendants and other jewelry items.

But since the beginning of the year, 20 different children's jewelry items sold to tens of thousands of Canadian families have been recalled after Health Canada tested samples and found they were made of almost pure lead.

“How does a company sell something like this without knowing? If it was 0.1 per cent or just above, but 90 per cent?” asks Lukovic.

Groupe Dynamite Inc., the Montreal-based company that imported the recalled jewelry for its retail chain Garage, is hardly alone, but the story of these particular products reveals a system that can offer little real protection for Canadian consumers, allowing toxic jewelry pieces to clear multiple hurdles in the supply chain to find their way into the homes of unsuspecting families.

•••

The Hamburg Express docked at the bustling port of Shekou, one of four that make up the Shenzhen port, just before midnight on Oct., 15, 2009, to pick up a huge haul of Chinese goods destined for the United States and Canada. The giant container ship, the length of three football fields and nearly as wide as one, was loaded up and sailed the following afternoon from China's second busiest port, after Shanghai.

Tucked away in one of the containers were 167 kilograms of cheap jewelry manufactured by Betawin Enterprises and bound for more than 100 Garage stores.

The Hamburg Express made overnight stops at the Hong Kong port and the port of the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung before making the 10-day, 10,000-kilometre trek across the Pacific Ocean to the Pacific Northwest. After unloading goods in Seattle, the mammoth vessel sailed for British Columbia waters, where it docked in the early morning of Oct. 30, 2009, at one of three berths at the Vancouver Port big enough to accommodate such a huge container vessel.

As Canada's largest and busiest port, Vancouver handles nearly 130 million tons of cargo each year. The goods end up in trucks for distribution in British Columbia or railcars bound for distribution centres in Central Canada.

The Hamburg Express alone makes eight trips to the Vancouver port a year, each an estimated 28,000 kilometres and 43 days long.

Andrew Lufty, Groupe Dynamite's chief executive officer, and president Anna Martini both declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a 2006 speech to the Montreal Board of Trade, Martini hinted at the company's intricate distribution system.

“The entire logistics of getting the product from a vessel in China to a warehouse in Montreal to a store in Newfoundland is a whole other world worthy of many hours of discussion surrounding critical factors,” Martini told the business crowd.

According to publicly available U.S. customs data, Groupe Dynamite worked with 79 different suppliers scattered across China between August 2007 and October 2009 to send 1,470 shipments of goods through the U.S. destined for its Garage stores or its sister brand Dynamite.

Together, these shipments, mostly of clothes and shipped on two dozen different container vessels, weighed close to four million kilograms.

Like Groupe Dynamite's operation, cheap jewelry from China makes up a small fraction of the flow of goods that come through the Vancouver port. But the amount of imitation jewelry destined for girls' hands, wrists and necks just keeps growing in scale as more Canadian importers and retailers figure out the low manufacturing costs in China more than offset the long transcontinental journey.

According to Statistics Canada, jewelry imported directly from China grew from a paltry $315,000 in 1990 to nearly $20 million last year.

The flip side of this boom is the apparent stream of children's jewelry items with high levels of lead that sail through customs and land on store shelves.

Privately, officials at Health Canada's product safety branch acknowledged as much last year in a report about internal tests showing high levels of lead in imported children's jewelry. The report, released to Canwest News Service under Access to Information legislation, highlighted “difficulties of maintaining quality control over imported products.”

On the day the Hamburg Express docked in Vancouver last October, Canada Border Services Agency cleared for entry about 1,000 commercial shipments at the port. Throughout that month, a total of 55,177 marine containers were imported through the Vancouver port.

According to official CBSA talking points, “officers thoroughly screen all goods coming into Canada and examine closely those that may pose a threat to the safety of Canadians.”

Despite this lofty statement, what this actually means is customs officials verify the paperwork to make sure all declarations on shipments are accurate, such as the size of the shipment and their declared value.

And customs officials wait for “clear instructions” from the department to flag or place “border lookouts” on product categories of concern. But these flags are limited to products with visible hazards, such as baby walkers and other banned products.

That means none of the estimated 3,500 shipments that have been refused entry by Health Canada since 2005 have been for things like children's jewelry because invisible or hidden hazards cannot be identified at the border.

“When you talk about something like children's jewelry, you can't look at it, and say it's got 62 per cent lead. Until you establish a violation, there's really not a whole lot you can do,” says Robert Ianiro, director of consumer product safety at Health Canada.

Once a shipment is cleared for entry, there are few ways a company can be caught distributing or selling kids' jewelry with high levels of lead - the most likely is a Health Canada annual testing program where technicians usually test fewer than 100 suspicious items plucked from store shelves by product safety officers.

That's because retailers don't conduct their own regular spot tests of items on their store shelves, and some smaller distributors and importers don't insist that their wholesalers or other middlemen in the supply chain provide results by an accredited laboratory showing the jewelry is safe.

And even if they do have test results in hand from a Chinese supplier, an industry insider says results can easily be compromised, giving importers a false sense of security.

In the end, then, girls can wind up browsing stores like Garage, where they can buy a bracelet packed with lead for $6.90 that experts say can only be made a few different ways - locally mined lead, melted down electronic waste, also known as e-scraps, or even recycled lead-acid car batteries.

With files from Aileen McCabe in Shenzhen

Tomorrow: Inside the inspection process and how leaded jewelry pieces slip past so many players in the supply chain.

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